Chinese quadruped startup halts as workers claim $1.1M in unpaid wages
Wujing announced $15.5M in funding and nearly $140M in orders this summer. Now staff say pay stopped in August and the founder is unreachable.
A Nanjing embodied-intelligence startup that announced 110 million yuan in fresh funding and nearly 1 billion yuan in orders this summer has halted operations, with employees saying 30 to 40 staff members are owed close to 8 million yuan (about $1.1 million) in back pay. Workers told the National Business Daily that wages stopped in August, housing-fund contributions were cut in September and social-insurance payments in October. Some employees have filed for labor arbitration, and staff say they can no longer reach the company's actual controller, Cui Xiaofei.
The collapse is a stark reversal for Nanjing Wujing Future Power Technology, founded on February 11, 2026 to build industrial quadruped robots for power-grid inspection, petrochemical and energy-mining scenarios. In June, local media reported the four-month-old company had signed nearly 500 million yuan in framework orders with central state-owned enterprises and held close to 500 million yuan more in local market reserves, with 110 million yuan in financing secured. The district government website cited a company executive in July confirming the funding round and saying a substation-inspection quadruped was due for delivery in October.
The financing trail is convoluted. In June, Beijing Stock Exchange-listed Junchuang Technology disclosed a 32.01-million-yuan fund targeting Wujing — but routed through an unusual structure: the fund would first invest in Suzhou SuperLight Micro, a medical-optics firm sharing the same legal representative, Cui, then swap equity to hold Wujing directly. The fund raised its first 16 million yuan and completed regulatory filing in July. Yet an August 24 ownership reshuffle moved Wujing under a new holding company 62.51% owned by Cui himself — with the fund nowhere in the shareholder register. Whether the investment ever closed is unclear, and Junchuang did not respond to inquiries.
Yuan Haihui, the CEO who built the technical team, told the paper on October 22 that he could not reach the actual controller and declined further comment; staff describe him as apologetic and willing to help track down Cui. The episode is a cautionary data point for China's embodied-AI funding boom — a startup going from celebrated order books to wage arbitration in under six months.